Practical PathFactory for Sales – Relationship One

Sales and Marketing – The Perfect Match

What makes the perfect pair? Why does a particular wine pair so nicely with a filet? Why do certain decorative features change the vibe of a living space? Why is peanut butter and jelly or macaroni and cheese so popular? Some would argue that various flavors, colors, and decor complement each other in ways others cannot. Their essence brings out the best in what’s around them. That’s the power of the perfect pairing – enhancement. In these situations, one plus one equals three. When done right, sales and marketing can be that perfect match. 

As marketers, we strive to use data, campaigns, and workflows to enhance our sales team’s power, efficiency, and effectiveness. Traditionally, we’ve done this through sales and marketing alignment and its optimization. We strive to continually enhance the sales/marketing funnel, providing communications and programs that guide consumers through their buying cycle, and offering qualified leads to our sales team. When prospects reach a specific threshold of engagement, we send them to sales, hoping to increase our team’s close rate. We look for ways to enhance programs and touchpoints throughout the buying cycle, knowing that most purchase decisions are made before a salesperson is ever contacted.

Beyond the funnel, marketers aim to enable sales through rich data and templated communications that sales can use during their cycle. If marketing technologies are integrated with sales platforms, marketers can provide sales with engagement data based on historical emails, SMS messages, and advertisements. Some marketing automation tools, like Oracle Eloqua’s Profiler and Engage are built to put this information at sales’ fingertips.

As marketing matures, and the need to hone in on buyers’ immediate need grows, we’ve moved to technologies that allow marketer’s to monitor and react to buyers in real-time. We’ve invested in behavioral intelligence tools that allow real-time decisioning and actions. We’ve also aligned with content management systems that provide content based on user profiles, industries, and interests. As our data and capabilities have increased, so too has our need to utilize this information to enable our sales teams. 

In our “on-demand” world, sales needs to know the engagement level of a prospect or account immediately, so they can take action and provide meaningful content when needed. Historical data no longer cuts it. Marketers are now sending real-time information to Sales, so they can prioritize their outreach for maximum efforts. One tool that has perfected this ability is PathFactory through its Revenue Intelligence module.

PathFactory for Sales – Real-Time Sales Enablement

The PathFactory for Sales engine gives your sales team the power to prioritize their day based on real-time behavioral data, whether account or contact based. Armed with detailed content engagement data, your sales team can provide relevant follow-up based on the needs and interests of your top prospects and customers. The PathFactory for Sales widget provides sales members with a detailed view of account and contact insights while also allowing them to share curated content related to the immediate interests of their buyers.

Account Insights

With Account Insights, sales can easily see which accounts have been most actively consuming content. They can also review which contacts in these accounts have been engaging the most, sorted by activity level. Further analysis can be done to see content engagement over time, helping to analyze if there’s an increased interest within a specific product, service, or focal area. Through custom searches using CRM attributes, your sales team can dive deeper into the activity of their “key accounts” or contacts within certain regions or business units. Throughout the tool, PathFactory provides sales the ability to drill deeper, viewing the materials accessed.

Contact Insights

Similar to Account Insights, Contact Insights provides detailed content engagement metrics at a person level. Here, your sales team can see the amount of time each contact has spent on an asset, sorted by most popular. There is also an engagement timeline that allows them to see someone’s interaction with content over time. Just like with Account Insights, sales can drill deeper into each activity, seeing the content as your prospect or customer viewed it. Seeing a contact’s top content by time spent allows your sales team to position products and services more relevantly. If your CRM is integrated with your marketing automation tool, you can also alert sales when contacts are binging on content – a good time for them to reach out and make a connection.

Content Activation

Content Activation elevates your sales team’s ability to engage their buyers through direct communication. From within the tool, they can easily copy links to content or tracks and send those links through their native email application or other sales tools. The best part is that you, as marketers, can create specific streams for sales to use. PathFactory allows you to create branded tracks based on industries, personas, use cases, services, etc. Although your sales team can send links for individual pieces of content, marketers can help guide the engagement with curated tracks specifically for sales to utilize. All content engagement is tracked throughout PathFactory and can be used for further analysis and follow up. 

Today’s Sales Enablement

In our modern marketing world, sales/marketing alignment goes beyond lead management, funnel stages, and lead scoring. Marketing is in a unique position to truly empower sales through data and technology. Modern marketers are data-driven, using real-time behaviors, predictive, and artificial intelligence to help target and nurture prospects and accounts. At the same time, today’s consumers expect to be engaged on their terms, and they trust that companies collecting their behavioral data will use it to enhance their experiences. Marketers have the ability to provide sales with consumer information that will not only help sales in their conversations, but also enhance the communication received by customers. This not only engages the customer at a higher level, but it also streamlines the buyer’s journey and provides consistency in messaging across your sales and marketing efforts.

If you’re looking to enhance your sales enablement practices, or you’re interested in learning more about how PathFactory can help you, Relationship One is always here to help.

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